Senator Lindsey Graham warned on Sunday that if Republicans take control of the House of Representatives by next year, Vice President Kamala Harris could be blamed for her tweet supporting a bailout fund for Black Lives Matter protesters during the summer.
In an interview on Fox News Sunday, a day after the US Senate acquitted President Trump, the South Carolina Republican said that the former president’s accusation, due to the deadly riots on January 6, “Pandora’s Box ‘opened it. ‘
“If you use this model, I do not know how Kamala Harris is not accused when the Republicans take over the House, because she actually saved rioters …”, Graham said of the former California senator from Oakland. “So we opened Pandora’s Box here, and I’m sad for the country.”
Like many Republicans who trump Trump, it looks like Graham equated the deadly siege on the U.S. Capitol last month with protests last summer, two different events rooted in opposing movements.
On June 1, Harris tweeted a link to a fundraiser for the Minnesota Freedom Fund and asked her followers to pledge bail to protesters in the city after outrage over the murder of George Floyd police. Video captured the incident in which Floyd, who was black, gasped for breath and handcuffed to the ground when an officer pressed a knee to his neck on May 25th.
The Black Lives Matter movement demands the end of systemic racism that black people often take out of proportion. Small fragments of nationwide protests last year included violence, but the movement was largely peaceful – although scenes of looting and arson attracted the attention of the media and the public. A recent Princeton University study found that 93% of the 7,760 demonstrations associated with the Black Lives Matter movement in 2020 were peaceful.
The riots by Trump supporters aimed to thwart a free election by attacking a U.S. institution, and took the lives of five people, including one police officer. Trump’s supporters turned up at his behest to ‘fight like hell’, after declaring more than once that he had lost the election in a fraudulent manner, with countless conspiracy theories.
Some Republicans have drawn a false balance between the two events. Rep. Matt Gaetz of Florida and rep. Georgia Marjorie Taylor Greene focused on the violence during last summer’s civil rights protests during the prosecution.
Graham had previously spoken out about the possibility of accusing Harris and raising this issue earlier this month in an interview with Fox’s Sean Hannity. The senator’s office did not return requests for comment.
Shwanika Narayan is a staff writer for the San Francisco Chronicle. Email: [email protected] Twitter: @shwanika Instagram: @shwanika